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How Google Makes Money.
Advertising
On the surface, a search engine, no matter its popularity, doesn’t seem like the most profitable of ventures. You type in your query, hit enter and then find your results without making any payment. The oft-overlooked money-making machine for Google is advertising, which allows Google to make its profits off its sites and other sites that participate in Google’s advertising schemes.
Sponsored Links
You may not notice it, but when you perform a search in Google, sponsored links appear on the right side of the screen. These are advertisers that make a business agreement with Google in order to get their ads displayed alongside the results of the most appropriate searches. That way, people searching for used cars may find people selling cars with the sponsored links.
AdWords
Google uses an AdWords system that allows a potential advertiser to specify the search terms she would like to specify as the words that, when searched, will display her ads. A flower shop in San Francisco, for example, could have a keyword that involves the city in which it does business and type of business, such as “San Francisco florist.”
AdSense
Because of the immense popularity of Google, plenty of customers that want to advertise on the grand frontier that is the Internet. When people pay for these advertisements, that is where Google makes the lion’s share of its money. Website owners can also sign up for Google’s AdSense program, which includes ads on the website that are contextually relevant. When visitors click on them, all parties make money.
A Win-Win-Win Situation
Although the idea of making money off of a search engine can be difficult to understand, it all lies in advertising, which allows everyone to benefit. Those who advertise get increased business, and Google gets the money from their payments. Consumers who search for certain products may find it easier to find what they are looking for by using the sponsored links than to pore through all of the results, so it is a win-win-win situation.
Social Media Top Sports Source For 81% Of Fans
So I’m reading a blog from a well-known sports marketing agency (who shall remain nameless) and I come across a post that says, “Today, people are 10 times more likely to check Twitter or Facebook for breaking news than sports radio. In fact, 81% prefer the Internet for their sports news, period. This is radio, signing off.” The post is punctuated by a graphic pronouncing “Internet killed the radio jock!”
It is both short-sighted and simplistic. It smacks of yet another social media bandwagon jumper, warning us yet again of the inevitable demise of traditional mediums.
In fact, there’s a very strong evidence that sports radio is growing – its audiences, its advertising revenues, its personalilites – and what’s more – radio is key component in the battle for sports network supremacy amongst North American media companies.
In the United States, the sports talk radio format has grown almost 65 percent since 2002. There are now 677 stations according to figures from Inside Radio. In Canada, TSN has followed the lead of its sister to the south, ESPN, and recently re-branded three new stations (Vancouver, Winnipeg, Montreal) to an all-sports format. Toronto now has two all-sports stations, the first, FAN590, being one of the most consistent ratings performers in the last decade.
The strong numbers lies in the very nature of sports itself. Its undeniable foothold in popular culture inspires dialogue. Fans are among the most passionate people in the world – and they want to share their opinions with other like-minded folks. Not just on Twitter or Facebook, but with thoughtful, meaningful dialogue like that available at the all-sports LockerDome and www.kcoldschool.lockerdome.com Increasingly, sports radio is the forum of choice. The advent of instant tweets and Fan Page posts simply adds another dimension to this passionate conversation.
Surprisingly, the sports format seems to be growing at the expense of music. After all, music is now available on multiple platforms, particularly a fully customizable iPod or on niche-targeted satellite services from Sirius XM. Sports radio, on the other hand, thrives on local teams, local fans and local advertising. According to a recent article in Sports Business Journal, the launch of numerous sports stations on the FM dial also is fueling growth. Staff writer John Ourand, points out that 125 sports talk radio stations were operating on FM nearing the end of 2011.
Here’s the other reason sports radio isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. Radio is an integral part of the 21st media company platform strategy. The ESPN’s of this world get it. Storytelling – and the sharing of great stories – is becoming the new currency of the modern world. Successful media companies share their most compelling stories across a wide spectrum of platforms.
ESPN streams online, televises on TV and has introduced apps and podcasts designed for mobile devices. They share talent too, shifting on-air personalities from TV to radio to internet. Each platform cross-promotes the other. Behind it all, the media assets they can present to advertisers are rich, connected and comprehensive.
Of all formats, it could be argued that those founded on delivering sports content are not only the most likely to survive, but will thrive in the modern media landscape. Twitter and Facebook aren’t driving sports radio stations to extinction, they are making them even better – now and in the near future.
Source: John Huckle and Landon White at www.kcoldschool.lockerdome.com
Boston Bruins Score Hat Trick With Social, Mobile and Digital Media Property
In what’s believed to be a pro sports first, the NHL’s Boston Bruins announced on Monday the launch of a media property uniting all of the team’s social, digital and mobile efforts under one umbrella.
The Boston Bruins Digital Entertainment Network (DEN) essentially functions as a portal to the team’s social presence on sites from Facebook to Pinterest, a gateway to its mobile app, and a home for video and other digital content offerings.
Amy Latimer, the Bruins’ senior vice president of marketing and sales, says the network will help the team provide accessible content for fans as well as create better opportunities for sponsors.
“Our fans are on the receiving end of great content that is accessible through all of the digital channels that they use and is distributed in a streamlined, organized fashion,” Latimer told Mashable in an email. “Our corporate partners now have the ability to reach more than 2.5 million unique Bruins fans per month while aligning their brand with compelling content in a manner that is fan friendly.”
Read Full Article At: http://kcoldschool.lockerdome.com/
From: Mashable, Douglas Burson
Ireland’s Amazing Six-Fingered Lady
Created By: Najan Da and Douglas Burson
Posted in Social Media Strategy
Tagged douglas burson, farming, green, irish american, nurturing, planting, socially artistic, sweettomato
One Shining Moment.
Michigan State Mascot
You’re Out! Pininterest By Invitation Only.
Pininterest, the almost two-year-old social scrapbooking site, is on a tear. TechCrunch reported on Tuesday that Pintrest reached 11.7
million monthly active users. Whether they are indeed the fastest independent
site to reach 10 million monthly uniques in the U.S. or not is a quibble (They
have been in open beta since March 2010).
The fact is, they are firmly on the
radar of people in the content business, in the retail business—in all
businesses that target consumers. Here’s why:
1. It’s a Fun Experience: There are lots of ways to consume
content curated by other people, but Pinterest is a much more enjoyable—and lean back— experience than, for instance, Facebook or even Flickr. Many users describe paging through grids of sympathetically grouped pictures addicting. The fact that there is still room for new entries in the field suggests that despite their huge popularity, social networking sites have not created great content
experiences.
2. It’s Easy: Pinterest’s bookmarklet makes quick work of
responding to things you see online, which turns passive viewing into active
curation.* It’s simultaneously a way to share and a way to remember what you’ve
seen and liked.
3. It’s About Discovery, Not Search: As pointed out earlier on
TechCrunch, we go to Google or Amazon, keywords in
hand, when we know what we are looking for. But how we discover things we want in the first place is still wide open. Pinterest promises to be a one-stop-shop
for anything we might want to discover (at least visually).
4. It Appeals to the Silicon Prairie: Although based in Palo
Alto, Pinterest’s founder, Ben Silbermann, is from Iowa. “The first people to understand the website were mostly women in Des Moines, then Minneapolis, then Houston and Chicago. To this day, the Midwest and Iowa in particular are disproportionately represented given its population amongst our user base,” says Silberman.
5. The Content is the Navigation: Again, unlike Facebook, Pinterest has a lot less visible plumbing making it all work. Without the chrome, the ads and the news ticker you’re left just navigating a lot of beautiful pictures.
6. It’s About Interests, Not Friends: Instead of the emphasis on who you know that has been the backbone of social networks, Pinterest is all about what you like. Shared interests are only one aspect of friendship—we don’t necessarily pick our friends because of their curation skills. Ironically, the pinboards help you get to stuff that interests you quicker by sidestepping your actual friends.
7. It Creates Persistent Content: Unlike Facebook and Twitter that create fleeting timeline streams of content, Pinterest’s pinboards stay put. This is great for sharing and collaborating on image collections with other people, but particularly valuable to creatives or brands with something to sell.
8. It’s Like Shopping: Although referred to by any number of
analogies (my favorite so far is “fantasy football for girls.”) Pinterest resembles nothing so much as shopping. Perhaps flea market shopping, perhaps like the old Sears Roebuck catalog, perhaps like the mall, but shopping. And even though there are links to buy things, and even though Pinterest undoubtably inspires purchases of all kinds, it can also be a recession appropriate form of window shopping.
9. It Can Be About Anything: There have been other sites that encourage curation and reporting through bookmarklets and the like, but beyond skewing seriously female, the design of the Pinterest product doesn’t limit what seems appropriate to put there.
10. It Doesn’t Seem Commercial (Yet!): Pinterest is still in the blush of startup and has a very positive community ethos. A recent issue about SkimLinks affiliate links (which the company asserted was just a test) risks clouding the feel-good vibe, and there will surely be other issues (See Peter Himler‘s contention about scraping your Facebook friends, for instance). But if they are patient and careful there certainly must be a way to convert all of that traffic into revenue without scaring away their loyalists.
Source: Forbes and Douglas Burson
Posted in Social Media Strategy
Tagged #idigitalorganicmedia, douglas burson, pininterest, social media tips, sweettomato
Father Fires Nine Shots Into Daughter’s Doll.
Dad Puts Some Hollow Point Slugs In His Daughte…
Follow my videos on vodpod
I avoided it…
…then finally made myself watch this YouTube Celebrity…after
seeing a Facebook Wall Post.
It’s parental terrorism. At the point of a gun. 9 shots!
22 million YouTube views.
The “Clip” now even has its own Fox Primetime TV Commerical.
A Detective Team sent this man a “Thank You” note. The man himself says “his wife, daughter and mother are ‘good with it.’”
If I lived in this household…I would be good with it, too…or
probably not writing this……(bang!).
If you’re a Facebook user or consumer of other social media…and
find anything less than a parental terrorist message in this…from a father
who claims to be a “computer technician”…you’re as sick as he is…
.and probably still anxious to discover fire and the wheel…
…and probably consider John Deere Equipment operators HTML
coders.
He should be in jail.
Are You Age 40+. Inforgraphic Shows Why You Are Unhireable Without This Set Of Skills.
1. The Social Engagement Spectrum
2. 10 Levels of Intimacy in Today’s Communication
3. The Social Media Effect
4. Social Marketing Compass
5. Facebook vs. Twitter
6. Balance Your Media Diet
7. Social Media Statistics
8. Social Web Involvement - Sweettomato
9. The Spectrum of Online Friendship
10. How People Share Content on the Web
11. Donut Marketing
12. Twitter Territory
13. Twitter PR Strategy
14. The Journey of a Tweet
15. The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions
16. When Social Media Attacks
17. The Art of Listening
18. The Conversation Prism
19. Word of Mouth Visualized
20. Social Web Reputation Management Cycles
21. Twitter Statistics
22. The Story (So Far) of Twitter
23. Who Participates Online
24. Gender Balance on Social Networking Sites
25. Building a Company With Social Media
26. The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits—to You
27. Social Media Spending
28. The Facebook Juggernaut
29. Twitter Perceptions of Google Buzz Over Time
30. Breakdown of the Blogosphere
31. Visualizing 6 Years of Facebook
32. The Boom of Social Sites
33. Age Distribution of Social Sites
34. Make Social Media Work for Your Company
35. The World Map of Social Networks
Why You’re Not On Google’s First Page. Social Media/SEO Tips The Pros Use.
Justifying the Value of SEO
Editor’s Update: One of the points to be kept in mind in any aspect of SEO is return on investment of time, money…ultimately, the margin on your digital asset. You may have a #1 Ranking on a keyword, for example, but at what cost?
Most people don’t set fair expectations for a search engine optimization (SEO) effort. I was reminded of this while speaking with a prospect, who asked what kind of a return on investment (ROI) he should expect from his SEO engagement.
“I’m expecting exponential growth, something like 20X the traffic that I’m currently getting,” he told me. “If we can get a number 1 ranking for this one keyword, that should be enough to get us there, don’t you think?”
One Top Ranking Isn’t Enough
Your goal can’t be to rank number 1 on one keyword. That’s not a goal.
What happens if you get the top ranking for your keyword and something happens, such as a major algorithm tweak by Google? You’ve then lost your ranking for that one keyword. What then?
Though everyone has one of those keywords that they salivate over, a solid, long lasting presence in the search engines is one in which your presence is balanced across a number of keywords.
A “goal” should be increasing traffic and – at the end of the day – growing your business (more leads, more sales, and ROI).
SEO vs. Paid Search
Many people find it easy to budget for paid search. They understand the basic premise:
- Spend $1 per click.
- Set a budget of $10,000.
- Get 10,000 clicks for keywords I want to “rank” for.
But what if you could potentially get 20,000 clicks by investing that same $10,000 in SEO rather than PPC advertising? Wouldn’t that be an even better deal?
To be fair, the above example is an over-simplification only intended to make a point. This 20,000 might represent a 10 percent increase in “good” traffic – meaning traffic that’s relevant, converts into a lead or sale, or at least shows some quality measurements (e.g., time on site).
After telling this to the prospect, he paused. “I’ve never really thought about it that way.”
SEO ROI: No Guarantees?
- There’s no search volume for the keywords you’re
interested in targeting – no amount of number 1 rankings could ever equal ROI.
SEO can be high risk, high reward. When I say “high risk,” I’m not talking about the kind of high risk associated with the possibility of being banned/penalized in the search engines for such tactics as hacking, cloaking, spamming, etc.
My point is that, even given that you work within the search engine’s guidelines, there truly are no guarantees because we don’t own the search engines. Search engines are a third party we have zero control over.
A “Good” ROI on SEO
If you’re investing $10,000 per month in an SEO effort (be it in staff costs or with an agency), you need to get a sense as to what a “good ROI” looks like.
Perhaps you’re one of many who have noticed that cost per click in paid search is getting higher and higher for the keywords that you’ve been targeting. Perhaps it’s gotten to a point where it’s challenging to make a case that the money spent is worth it?
Let’s say that you sell a widget for $100, and you net 30 percent from each sale ($30). If your average cost per click is $1 and you convert 1 percent into a sale, that’s $100 invested in paid search for 100 clicks for a $100 sale in which you netted $30.
Unless you care about the branding value (which I would argue folks should consider, at least a little bit, when they’re looking at valuation of PPC and SEO), that’s not a good ROI. In fact, that’s no ROI. That’s a loss.
What would you need your investment to be for this to pay off? Let’s do some math: out of every 100 visitors, we convert 1 percent into a sale in which we make $30. We would need 3,000 visitors to get 30 sales. Those 30 sales would be worth $3,000 (300 X $100/each) and we would net 30 percent of this ($900). Since we’d need about 10 times that revenue to make this work, we’re going to need 10 times the number of visitors (30,000).
Do we feel that we could put $7,000/month worth of resources (money/time, etc.) into a SEO effort to help to achieve the goal of gaining 3,000 visitors? Or, perhaps the conversion rate is way off and it’s more like 5 percent?
Perhaps we need 6,000 visitors? Are we willing to fund this “at a loss” (during the initial months of research, etc.) in order to hopefully realize the potential ROI for the months thereafter?
Tools to Help Determine the Value of SEO
Once you’ve mapped out how, and/or if, SEO can drive ROI then you can begin to discuss how much value/opportunity there may be and what the risks and rewards might be.
I’ve mentioned these tools before, but to get a sense of what the potential value of an SEO effort might be, I would recommend SEMRush and SpyFu Recon. There are certainly many other providers which can also help with an opportunity assessment and I welcome readers to comment below and share with others tools that you might use and why you like them.
Written By My Good Friend Mark
Jackson; Edited By Douglas Burson